Falon Peters joins the pod to discuss how organizations not only wreak change but design it for flourishing. Our crew is open to her ideas but skeptical as well (and, ok, fatigued).

Here's a lead-up to the show:

When you jerk people around in a workplace—through layoffs and policy revisions, e.g.—you’re not just reshuffling columns on a spreadsheet. You’re intervening on a biota.

Think of a biota as a forest or a piece of farmland, sheltering and relying upon a complex network of interdependent elements. What gives vitality to a biota is the energy that flows from seemingly unimportant parts of the place (like the soil) to more conspicuous elements (like the crops and insects and birds) to the most obvious participants (like hunters and farmers).

In organizations, too, vitality fountains up from nonobvious to more obvious participants. But American workplaces tend to drive organizational change not by attuning to the complexity of their biotas but by the urgencies of monetary efficiency.

Think of Amazon’s plan to eliminate 14,000 middle managers, announced last week.

Heck, I wouldn’t want to be a middle manager at Amazon. Maybe it’s a good thing that machines do all that managerial work, drafting memos, tying down lists, assigning shifts, monitoring production reports. But Amazon’s decision will affect more than middle managers. It will affect the whole ecology of early-to-mid-career professionals, redirecting their career pathways and obstructing the energy flowing upwards that Amazon’s own biota relies on.

Years ago, Elizabeth Kolbert warned of a coming “Sixth Extinction” in the history of our planet. We can’t address such large-scale crises at the Mode/Switch roundtable. But here’s what our intergenerational crew—Emily, LaShone, Ken, and I—can do. We can help prevent the next workplace extinction by sharing the wisdom of people like our guest this week, Falon Peters of the Grand-Rapids-based Crowe X-Design Lab. She’s got ideas (and we have questions) about how organizations can do more than wreak change. They can also design it for everybody’s wellbeing.

You’ll want to stick around for our roundtable wrap-up. Things get dark for us in this conversation. But then, we’re trying to pay attention to death and resurrection in the American workplace.

-craig

P.S. Can you spot my dependence on Aldo Leopold’s work in what I wrote above? See his essay “⁠The Land Ethic⁠“ for more on the mutuality of biotas.

A heckuva lot of Gen Z folks are lying on their resumes these days. But then, 47% of Americans, according to a NORC-AP poll, are “not very” or “not at all” sure they secure a good job.

In a job market like this one, lying’s not just a Gen Z thing. The Mode/Switchers—Ken the Boomer, David & Craig the Xers, Emily the Xennial, and Madeline the Z—agree on this at least: fibbing’s an intergenerational phenomenon. So, we ask…

What is it about work culture today that makes deception feel indispensable?

Our guest, Danielle Droitsch, is an Executive & Professional Growth Coach with a law degree from the University of Tennessee Winston College of Law and a background in environmental consulting. Recently, she’s written “What Sets Apart Great Managers.”

Our takeaway from talking with Danielle? Good managers need to listen better so the rest of us can see and say the truth.

Telling the truth on the job’s not just about speaking what you hate to admit. It’s about seeing and speaking the strengths that too few people, including you, can see.

Karen Swallow Prior helps us Mode/Switchers engage career shock and organizational change with the wisdom of some permanent things.

In the 90s, I thought that a career was a decently stable reality. In the 2020s, I no longer think that way. And I bet you don’t either. That vocational skepticism prompted our intergenerational team to ask Dr. Karen Swallow Prior, author of the new book You Have a Calling, to help us cope with the crazy-fast changeableness of career and life today.

We Mode/Switchers want to know: What if we’re not working at our current job for the next ten years? Heck, what if we’re out of work tomorrow? Our guest speaks to these questions with (to use her own Thomistic term) luminosity.

But I felt a tension in this podcast episode, a tension so great I couldn’t even name it during the conversation. Frankly, we were having too much fun. Professor Prior’s a very funny person, even when she’s talking about seriously unstable ground.

But if our conversation with Prior was enjoyable, the tension I was feeling wasn't.

One pole of the tension is this: we need to be creatively playful with our own lives. Our experience is way too dynamic for us to adopt the dull seriousness of boiled potatoes. Dr. Prior knows this first hand: she has just left a job and changed the career she thought she’d always be in. She’s had to mentor herself into being curious about her calling in an evolving set of work conditions.

Prior’s recommendations remind me of Anne Laure Le Cunff’s excellent new book Tiny Experiments, which says, in effecti: Don’t settle for what’s always been. Don’t listen to what others have always told you. Instead, try short, bold, playful pilots in your life and work—and see what comes! (I’m reading this book after hearing Lee C. Camp interview the author on No Small Endeavors.)

But the tension pulls the other way, too: we have to make very serious choices. When things go dark—when we lose our job, when the boss we loved leaves the org, when we feel bored by what we used to love—we need what the author James Williams calls “starlight,” the values that we navigate by. We need something more than an experimental mindset, in other words.

And here’s where Karen Swallow Prior offers light. She offers the wisdom of permanent (and she would say, universal) values: truth, goodness, beauty. Do you find yourself hesitating at that word “permanent”? Does anything hold still in a world whose changeableness accelerates every few weeks?

Good question. Let’s let it hang with it, while you press play on the pod.

But wait, let me say one more thing. The question, What if I lose my job next month? is a very focused question. But it also invites creative and far-ranging exploration about the biggest questions that come with being a person. That’s our Mode/Switch sweet spot. We look for tight practical pivots that orient us within bigger questions.

This is our 89th episode of making that move—from tight pivot to big questions. And it’s starting to feel like, well, a calling. I’m so grateful for how this podcast’s explorations of workplace culture. I’m just as grateful to be listening for callings in company with you.

-craig